There’s this guy in Chicago, name Joe Epstein, grew up in West Rogers Park, went to Daniel Boone School, you know him? He could have managed a furniture store or sold insurance or become a liquor distributor. Instead, he did good for himself in academe, editing a fancy magazine called The American Scholar and writing a bunch of books about other guys’ writing. You’d think he’d stick to highbrow stuff—instead, he wrote a book about furniture-store owners and street peddlers and loan sharks. Go figure. Or, as they say in Chicago, draw your own conclusions.

I don’t know whether Mr. Epstein indeed attended Daniel Boone, but having read these stories of his (which originally appeared in Commentary and The Hudson Review), I feel as if I’d attended it along with his characters. I also feel that he could have done at least as well as his characters in any of the above-mentioned businesses. Mr. Epstein’s is a world of middle-class Jewish tzores that is closer to Mordecai Richler’s mean streets of Montreal than to Philip Roth’s angst-ridden Newark. And, unlike his fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow, Mr. Epstein tackles this world in a deliberately lowbrow manner, using a great deal of control to prevent each story from becoming overly clever or sophisticated.

Then one day he meets Françoise—a lecturer in comparative literature, of all things!—and her son Philippe, and it becomes the big deal of his life.

One of Mr. Epstein’s pet subjects is the contrast